John's Gospel places the meeting at noon, an unusual hour for a woman to draw water alone, which later readers took as a sign she was avoiding the other women of the town. Christ asks her for a drink, then offers her "living water" that will mean she never thirsts again. The phrase became one of the most quoted lines in the Gospel and was read from early on as a figure for baptism: ordinary well water for the body, a different water for the soul. Nicolas Poussin, working the same subject a century before Kauffmann in his own lost late painting of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, placed a tomb in the background as a deliberate contrast between the old death and the new life the water promised, a detail he took from the surrounding biblical text about the plot of land where the well stood ^[5]. The reading of the encounter as a baptism scene, rather than simply a conversation, was well established by the time Kauffmann painted it.

History painting, meaning scenes from scripture, classical literature or ancient history, sat at the top of the academic hierarchy above portraiture, landscape and still life, because it was thought to demand invention and moral seriousness rather than simple observation ^[4]. Almost no woman painter of the period attempted it. Kauffmann's contemporaries who achieved comparable fame, such as Vigee Le Brun in France, worked chiefly as portraitists. Kauffmann's own path ran the other way: she started as a portraitist, was encouraged toward history subjects by the archaeologist and critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann after he sat for her in Rome in 1763, and built the rest of her career around biblical, classical and literary scenes ^[1]. She was formally barred from life-drawing classes, the standard training for a history painter, because a woman was not permitted to study the nude male model, and had to work around that gap for her entire career ^[4].

Kauffmann moved between Rococo softness and Neoclassical restraint rather than settling on one manner, and writers on her work have described her as equally at home in a Grand Manner idiom borrowed from the Roman Baroque ^[2]. She trained first under her father Joseph Johann Kauffmann, travelling with him across Switzerland, Austria and Italy from childhood, then absorbed the classicising influence of Winckelmann and of the sculptor and draughtsman circle around Anton Raphael Mengs in Rome. Her figures characteristically appear in flowing drapery under soft, even light, with the drama carried by gesture and expression rather than violent action, an approach suited to a scene built on a single quiet exchange of words rather than physical event.